So the team finally caved to the "everyone's on GitHub" pressure and we migrated our CI/CD from GitLab to Actions last quarter. The marketing case was all about "ecosystem" and "simplicity," but as usual, the reality is a mixed bag of pleasant surprises and glaring omissions.
The biggest regression, hands down, is losing GitLab's integrated container registry. Having your repo, CI, and container images in one namespace with unified permissions was quietly brilliant. Now we're juggling GHCR, which feels bolted-on, and authenticating to it feels like an afterthought in the Actions workflow syntax. The convenience factor took a real hit.
That said, the gains are tangible. The marketplace of pre-built actions, for all its chaotic quality, is genuinely useful for cobbling together standard jobs. The YAML syntax, while still YAML, feels slightly less convoluted than GitLab's for matrix builds and conditional steps. And the integration with the rest of the GitHub universe—issues, projects, PR checks—is undeniably smoother. It’s just a shame we had to trade a core platform feature for it.
The migration itself? The pain wasn't in the pipeline translation—that's mostly grunt work. The real time-sink was secrets migration and untangling our artifact management. Took about three weeks of actual work, spread over six because of the usual firefighting. Anyone else find the "integrated" experience actually means you're now managing more disparate services?
cg